In Which:
by Gerald Tarrant
Summary: In which graduation from Ohtori is just the first step out into the world. The cast of Shoujo Kakumei Utena, after the revolution.
1. Saionji Kyouichi Keeps A Diary

Saionji Kyouichi. What is a diary after all, except a collection of words?

_Shoujo Kakumei Utena and all characters are property of B-Papas, Saitou Chiho, Shogaku-kan, and TV Tokyo. Please do not repost without permission._

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**Kono Naka: Saionji Kyouichi Wa Nikki Ga Tsukeru  
[In Which Saionji Kyouichi Keeps A Diary]**

_"I felt that I had been very far away, in some land where the customs were  
strange – in Persia, I thought…But I could not remember the end of the dream."  
- James Joyce, "Dubliners"_

  
A girl I knew told me once quite long ago that boys don't keep diaries. They keep journals, she said, tossing her head at me like it was the most natural thing in the world she should know something I didn't. Girls had diaries and boys had journals.

I had asked why, and she had given me a look, what, you don't know how the world works?

I don't remember her name and am quite glad I don't. I do remember that she annoyed the living hell out of me. She was in one of my classes in university and every day she had some kind of snide comment for me as I walked in. I took to skipping class because it was too much.

I could have told her to go away, I suppose, or just ignored it, but I'm not that kind of person. When I was younger, I used to wish that I could change my personality, would pretend that I was some fearless, outgoing personality, the kind that always got chosen in junior high and high school as student council president or class leader or positions of that sort.

But I was not. I was simply Kyouichi, straight-A student, top 1% graduate, Todai scholar, and writer.

I kept a diary. I'd kept one ever since I was seven years old, and I had all the old entries in carefully locked and labeled books kept in a box in my closet. It was not a journal, because I said so.

After I graduated from the University of Tokyo, I'd stuck around downtown for a year or so, thinking that perhaps I might get used to the scholarly life there. The university had hired me as undergraduate professor of literature, which made sense since my degree was in Japanese literature, and I'd moved off campus into a tiny little apartment overlooking the streets of Ginza. It was supposed to be exciting in Tokyo, but I discovered three months into my teaching stint that I was not excited at all. I was simply cramped.

So I left.

I moved to the outskirts of the city, to a not-quite-sleepy yet not-quite-awake small-large town forty-five minutes on the Chuo line from Shinjuku, near enough to the heart of the metropolis that I was still there if I wanted to be, but far enough that I did not have to feel cramped.

I'd neglected to keep up my diary when I was teaching at Todai, probably because there was nothing at all going on in my life just then. It wasn't to say I didn't write, but it was that I would write once or twice a week instead of once or twice a day, as I had used to.

Some of my friends kept journals on the internet, on their computers, but I couldn't do that. I never even tried. There was something about the sound of pen scratching on paper that made me feel like I was accomplishing something.

"Good lord, Kyouichi," my friend Yuriko said playfully one night as I was relating to her the long and involved story of me, my insurance agent, and my JCI for my new car. "You should get a TV show or something. Or a radio show. Or at least a diary. Your life's like a novel."

I noticed she didn't call it a journal, but I still didn't feel comfortable telling her that I had one already. After that girl I knew in my university days, I'd kept that part of my life private. Diaries were private things, anyway.

Yuriko and I dated for about a year and then we broke up, quite amicably, because we both decided we were better off as friends than as lovers. My parents were disappointed; my mother and Yuriko's mother were best friends, and my father seemed to believe that the more grandchildren he had, the more secure he would be in his old age. I wasn't quite sure how that worked, but as I was an only child, I was his only hope.

But it was Yuriko's suggestion that planted the idea in my head that I should become a writer. I wrote several short editorials, submitted them to various magazines, and one of them liked me enough to hire me. I was a little shocked, and Yuriko was a little happy, and we went out to dinner to celebrate and almost got drunk enough to have sex.

Almost.

Besides Yuriko, I had various other friends from various other walks of life – a few of them writers, like me. Another was a plumber, and I couldn't remember how I had met him, but it had involved alcohol and a downtown bar in Roppongi. There was still another one who appeared and disappeared out of our lives at odd times, and from what we could gather, he lived month to month, hopping on the train when it suited him, coming back when he felt like it. He would tell us stories of places and towns we had never been to: Oita, Fukuoka, Naha, Hakodate, Sendai. I'd been at least as far west as Osaka and as far south as Tokushima, but Yuriko had admitted to never having been much of a traveler, and the farthest she'd ever been was Nagano, half an hour on the bullet train from Tokyo.

And then there was Kiryuu Touga.

He was one of those friends who, like the plumber, I should have never met. I didn't meet him in a bar under the influence of one too many drinks, but it was almost like I should have, because he appeared in my life just as mysteriously as he suddenly disappeared out of it less than a year later. Yuriko never really took a liking to him, but she couldn't ever tell me why.

No, I met Touga at an office function, one of the very few and far between office functions I went to, because they were all the same and I did not like the people in my office. Being somewhat of an anomaly at the magazine, I was not required to go into the office unless I had a piece to hand in, which was once a week. I remember the night I before I met him, I had been writing in my diary, strangely, about castles. Something about castles, and I had written half a page before I realized what I had written, stared at it, and ripped the page out and started over. A diary was a diary, but things like castles did not belong there. I was not a novelist.

There had been a lull at the party and I had been at the bar pouring myself, miraculously, a glass of water, because I only liked getting drunk with people I enjoyed being around, and I did not enjoy being around these people. They were dull. They probably thought boys should keep journals too.

"Hello," said a voice at my shoulder. "I haven't seen you around."

Touga was a full meter and a half taller than me, with shoulder-length red hair and a lopsided mouth that was even more lopsided when he smiled, which was often. You couldn't really tell his mouth was lopsided, but that was always the first thing he announced to people, I discovered. His teeth were perfectly white and even, and he had all the breeding and carriage of a member of the upper class.

That should have made me wary of him, but it didn't.

"Who are you?" I said.

"Mechanic," he said, flashing that charming, lopsided grin again.

I blinked. Mechanic? I'd expected something like intern journalist, freelance writer, date of someone I knew in the office. "Uh…all right."

He'd laughed. His laugh was like his teeth, white and even, but not flashy. Comfortable. "I fix cars."

He had explained later that he had been invited to the party by his brother-in-law, because he happened to be in town that weekend and his brother-in-law had thought it would be nice for him to meet some of the people in his office. I couldn't see how that could be, I wrote in my diary. _Office parties are fine for the average salaryman, and maybe a little dull for the corporate boss. But a guest? At an office party? He must have been bored to death._

If he had been bored to death, he never showed it, and I found his conversation entertaining, and we spent most of the rest of the party at the far end of the room, sipping drinks and people watching. I expected that to be my last encounter with him, but the following week he showed up at the next party, waving at me as I entered the door.

"I've decided to stay here for a while," he said. "Found a job in a local car garage with good pay."

Looking back in my diary, I see that I wrote after that second meeting that Touga seemed like a good guy, not quite charismatic, but the ladies would find him charming and the men would probably find him somewhat companionable. He was one of those guys you would watch soccer with on television on a Friday afternoon, or hang out with at one of the local bars at night on the weekend, both of which we did together after that second party. I wasn't quite sure what it was, then, that drew us together.

I'm not quite sure what it was now either. That one year with him is somewhat blurry, and when I try to look back at it in my diary entries, at least of what I recorded, my handwriting seems to have become inscrutably messy during that time and I cannot decipher most of what I wrote.

Touga took up residence in a small apartment two blocks from his car garage. In the evenings, I would usually walk over to his place and we would go get sushi in a small shop another couple of blocks away, or he would come over and we would watch soccer. He was a big soccer fan, and though I'd never been a big fan of the sport, I found his scathing commentaries on the players so amusing that I would sit through hours of it just to hear him talk.

Touga had a quick wit. That was one of the things I found most charismatic about him. His appearance was, at least at first, nothing special, though he was not bad-looking, and he always dressed in casual clothes – baggy jeans, old t-shirts – even if we were going out for the evening. Yuriko complained when she went with us that she hated his sense of fashion. I think that Yuriko amused him, or at least whenever he looked at her he would get a sort of faraway look in his eyes, as if she reminded him of someone.

The last diary entry I kept before the dreams began was dated 12 March, in which I wrote, _I think that meeting Touga has been one of those choices of fate that the poets used to write to us about – perhaps about the road not taken, or something along those lines. For some reason I feel like I took that road, and so far I am hoping I made the right choice._

I remember the dreams all as vividly as if I had been living them, even more vividly than any of my diary entries helped me remember my living memories. They did not come every night. Sometimes they would come in groups of two or three, continuations of the previous nights' dream. Sometimes there was one long dream and then I would not have any for the next few weeks. And sometimes they were nightmares.

Touga was in all of them but one.

The first night, I dreamed that I was walking the halls of a castle, a white marble castle, very cold and very beautiful and very empty. I woke up the next morning feeling strangely unsatisfied, as if I had been searching for something and had not found it, and that night I went over to Touga's place to get him to go eat dinner, and he mentioned that I had been in his dream the previous night.

"Oh?" I said, not thinking anything of it.

"I was in some sort of castle," he said, sounding bewildered, and I was not sure which startled me more – his words or the fact that he was bewildered, because I had never heard him sounding less than absolutely sure of himself. "I saw you out of the corner of my eye – you were going down the center hall. It seemed like you were looking for something, and then you looked up and looked straight at me, and I tried to call your name. But then I woke up."

The next night, I could feel the castle somewhere close by, but I was not in the castle but rather wandering through the halls of a large, dusty, deserted building that looked strangely familiar, though I did not know why. It was only with slight surprise that I turned a corner and found Touga leaning against the wall, dressed in some sort of school uniform, white, with a bemused smile on his face.

"Fancy seeing you here," he said.

We never spoke of the dreams in our waking encounters, though I could see the knowledge of them behind his eyes, and I'm sure he could see the same in mine. But every night, when we did dream, it was the same old building, the same hallway, and we would wander the hallways for hours. I don't think we ever did speak inside that building, except for the first time, but there was something in the air between us that transcended speech, something that was very much like memory, but not.

The dreams continued that way for almost a year, and then one night I opened my eyes and knew I was dreaming, but there was no building, just a platform of stone, and I was leaning against the railing. I turned and looked down and realized that it was a long way to the ground.

That was the first thing I realized. The second thing I realized was that I knew I had been here before.

"What is this place?" I whispered.

"Kyouichi?"

I saw him kneeling in the middle of the arena, for that was what it was – an arena of some sort. He had one hand pressed to the ground, as if supporting himself.

"I don't know what's happening," I said. "But…I've been here before."

He shook his head, and I saw that his red hair had grown several inches from its length in our waking life. It curled, long and fiery, around his shoulders and cascaded down his back, rich and luxurious, like a woman's tresses. His eyes, as he looked up at me, were almost frightened

"So…have I."

We saw each other less now, during the day. I'm not sure how or why we stopped seeing each other every day. I know Yuriko was relieved. She believed, perhaps rightly, I'm not sure now, that Touga was some sort of demonic influence on me, and relished every opportunity to tell me so and how glad she was that we were no longer hanging around each other. I took her berating with easy grace, going out to dinner with her or my friend who was a plumber, or our mutual friend who was a vagrant on the train, and she would listen with wide-eyed interest as he told her tales of his last Snow Festival in Sapporo, and I would stare moodily at the dark restaurant ceiling and drink.

Then I would go home and go to bed, and Touga would be there waiting for me.

I never touched Touga in the dreams. At least I don't think so. There are times now when I sit here, thinking about them, and I seem to remember the touch of his lips against me, perhaps on my cheek, perhaps my hand, perhaps my lips, perhaps somewhere on my neck, on my collarbone. But those are ghostly recollections at best, and to my knowledge, it never happened. But the arena made everything strange.

"Castles," Touga said one night, and I knew that to be true, that it had something to do with castles, but neither of us ever figured that out.

There were two nightmares, both of which were similar. In both of them we would be wandering the halls of the building or standing on top of the world in the arena which was so familiar to us but which neither of us could place. The sky would grow dark and it would begin to rain, except the rain was suddenly blocks of stone falling from the sky, and then the stones would turn into pointed swords, and I could not move, only watch as the swords dropped from the air around me. I remember thinking that I would die.

I would hear Touga's voice out of the wind that whipped through my clothes and my hair, Touga screaming my name, and then I looked up and saw that one of the swords had pierced me neatly through the chest.

Some people say that if you die in a dream, your true life in the waking world will end as well, but I did not die. I just remember the pain, the pain that stayed with me even when my eyes snapped open and I clutched my chest with both hands, which were sticky with sweat.

My diary begins again on 20 November, and that was the day the dreams stopped.

The last dream with him, on the night before that, is very unclear to me still. All the other ones come to me in crystal detail, but for some reason when I look back on that one, it all blurs together like runny watercolors in the rain. We were not in the arena, I know that much. There were roses, many roses. I remember him standing there in the garden, waiting for me, walking towards me as I stopped in the garden gateway.

He said something that I cannot remember, and then he reached out his hand to me, and I saw, on the fourth finger of his left hand, a seal with a rose crest on it.

I remember our fingers touched, just before I woke.

The next night, when I entered the dream, it was the castle again, the castle which I had not seen since the first dream, and I roamed the hallways, looking for him, always expecting him to be around the next corner, but he was not there.

When I got up the next morning, I showered and dressed hurriedly, driving up to his garage and inquiring at the front desk as to if he had come into work yet.

"Didn't you know?" the clerk at the desk had said, looking at me wide-eyed. They all knew I was Touga's friend. "He quit."

I stared.

"He quit two days ago," the girl on the other side of the clerk said, ruffling through some files, stopping to look up at me as she realized that no, I really did not know. I had no idea.

I drove to his apartment, hoping they were joking, or even if he really had quit, that he was still there, biding his time, collecting his thoughts. He'd given me the key to his rooms several months earlier, and when I put the key in the lock and turned, the lock had already been changed. I pounded on the door, but I knew the room was empty.

_There is nothing in this town that remains as evidence that he was here at all_, I wrote later that night, my handwriting slow and cramped, choosing the words carefully as if recording eight months of history all on a single page. _Not the building where he lived, not the place where he worked, not the friends who he kept, because I was his only friend. Even I, only a day after I last saw him, sit here in the dark and wonder if he really ever existed_.

But he did exist, I knew, because there had been the Friday afternoon soccer and the evenings at the sushi bar, and the weekends of drinking and doing things that ordinary males in their mid-twenties did on the weekends. Even if no one else remembered, I remembered.

I tried to recall my dreams to write down in my diary which I'd neglected, but whenever I pulled it out, intending to transcribe them, I found I could not remember them. I tried several times and then gave up. They were clear in my memory, anyhow, when I was not looking or thinking about the diary, and as long as they stayed there, it didn't matter if I wrote them down or not.

I would have told him about my diary keeping, about how every mention of his name on a page seems now to leap out to me before my eyes, like a spark or a small explosion of light. I would have told him how it was not a journal, but a diary, because diaries had life to them where journals did not. It did not matter that he did not appear in there often, and the dreams did not appear in there at all, because I had never told anyone else about the diary, and he would have been the first.

Sometimes I think of my vagrant friend train hopping his way across Japan, and wonder if Touga might be there doing the same. That makes me happy, because that way I can think that I will see him again sometime soon, and then we can watch soccer together again and go out to dinner on a Friday night, and he can tell me stories of places he's seen and then I could tell him about my diary, about how now that he is gone, the pages are covered with mentions of his name in neat, precise handwriting that is perfectly legible and easy to read, and how every night I go to bed in hopes that I can see him just one more time for reasons of my own that I barely even understand, reasons that are more than the simple wish to see an old friend again.

_It is not that I regret never having said goodbye to him_, I wrote. _It's not that at all…because I feel somehow that we never said hello in the first place, that our meeting that night was just the continuation of something that had been there since before we were born, something that I feel has not quite ended._

**28 Jan 04**


	2. Shinohara Wakaba Wants to Travel

Shinohara Wakaba. Life in Tokyo can be just a little confusing sometimes.

_Shoujo Kakumei Utena and all characters are property of B-Papas, Saitou Chiho, Shogaku-kan, and TV Tokyo. Please do not repost without permission._

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**Kono Naka: Shinohara Wakaba Wa Tabi Ni Detai  
In Which Shinohara Wakaba Wants To Travel**

_In the mountains in autumn  
Because there are so many fallen leaves,  
Looking for my lost beloved,  
I cannot find the path.  
- Anonymous, from the Manyoushuu_

I was born in Tokyo, into a family of two parents, three children, a dog, and five fish. The fish all died off when I was about three years old, and my parents never bought any new ones. Money was tight in our household, because my younger brother was autistic, and most of what my father earned went towards his care and medical expenses. So then it was just two parents, three children, and the dog.

My older brother was seven years older than me, and according to the doctors, he was going to be a girl. They were going to have named him Yuriko, but he turned out to be a boy and Yuriko was definitely no name for a boy. Disappointed, they waited until I was born, but my grandmother on my father's side, who had somehow fallen in love with the name Wakaba, was adamant that my name should be Wakaba. My parents really had no choice but to agree, but story was a well-known fact in our family, and everyone except for that one particular grandmother called me Yuriko. I thought it was amusing, but I was six years old before my mother told me that story, and by that time, I'd grown up thinking that my name was Yuriko, so it stuck.

I loved animals. I loved anything furry that walked, moved, or crawled across the earth, except caterpillars. Some of the girls at school used to bully me by putting caterpillars inside my desk before I got to school in the morning, and I would be putting my books away while the teacher called roll, and I would scream. Our homeroom teacher caught on after a few times and put a stop to that, but it didn't stop the girls from banding together and ganging up on me after school, pulling my hair and kicking me and doing all the other things insecure elementary school kids did.

They said it was because I had curly hair, but I have no doubt that even if my hair was completely straight and shiny like theirs, they would have found something else to tease me about. I was always the quiet one, the shy one, and everyone knew that my brother was not quite "normal". I didn't have any friends until I got to junior high, and even then they were few. I spent most of my free time by myself, reading fantasy books or just staring up at the sky outside my window, wondering what life was like outside Japan, in a world where there were no cruel classmates and in a place where people like my brother would be treated as people.

In high school, I grew sure enough of myself to join the theatre club. You'd think that for a shy girl like me, something like theatre would be completely out of my league, but for some reason, performing on stage did not bother me. Public speaking did, and to this day I cannot stand there in front of a crowd of people I don't know and say things. Faces begin to swim in front of my eyes and I start feeling dizzy. But acting was completely different. In acting, I was someone different, someone not myself, someone who might or might not be the shy, curly-haired, mediocre student that I was at the time, and it made me feel powerful, in control.

My parents had raised me to believe that I could do anything I put my mind to, which was unusual among Japanese parents at the time. I saw all my friends graduate and either stay at home and get married, or go to vocational school and become OLs and get married, or get into a prestigious university and graduate andﾁEet married. Rubbish, my father said. In the world of twenty years ago, perhaps, a woman's highest ambitions might have been to get married, but nowadays, in modern society, there was so much more of a future for me than that.

I took his words to heart and joined a theatre group. The pay was not much, and the practice hours were long, but I loved it. And not only that, I was apparently good at it.

I had been with the troupe for half a year when I met Saionji Kyouichi.

I suppose I couldn't actually call it a meeting, because I had known Kyouichi ever since we were in grade school. Our mothers had been best friends in university, and our fathers got along quite well. They were invited over to our house for dinner occasionally, and when they went on vacation they always brought us home a little souvenir. I know my father felt bad sometimes that we never bought them anything, but our family never went on vacation, because of my little brother.

I hated Japan sometimes because of it. I had suffered so much abuse in elementary school because of it, because my little brother was "different", and no matter how much my poor mother insisted that the view of people who had mental illnesses in Japan was changing, I had yet to see it. The Saionji family was, in my memory, the only family who never said a word, who went out of their way to help if we needed them.

But I was so shy that I'd never even spoken two words to Kyouichi whenever we saw each other. He had always been a studious boy, though with a mischievous gleam in his eyes at the oddest times, as if there was another Kyouichi, wild, rebellious, locked behind the gaze of the serious, quiet Kyouichi that we all knew.

He and I lost track of each other, I suppose, after a few years. He was about four years older than me, and I heard from my mother one morning at breakfast that he'd gone to Todai to study literature. That was nice, I said, filing that information in a corner of my mind for who knew what, and had picked up my backpack and gone to school. I didn't think about it again until that night at the play, when we had taken our last bows and I had gone backstage to change out of my costume, and there was a reporter waiting for us.

At first, I didn't recognize him. He'd bound his long green hair up into a semi-ponytail, and was wearing a casual button-down shirt and jeans, and I hadn't seen him in at least five years. He'd approached me with a friendly smile, bowing slightly.

"I'm with the Tachikawa News," he began, "and I'd like to ask you a few questions about your performance, if you don't mind."

I was slightly flattered. This was the first time I'd ever been interviewed, and I felt a little leap of joy. After every show, there would be some journalist or reporter backstage, but it had never been for me, always for one of the other leading ladies or the manager of the troupe, and I had gone home every night wondering when my turn would come. As he began asking me questions about my presentation of the character I was playing at the time, about my voice inflections and why exactly I had decided to become an actress, I couldn't help but stare at his curly green hair, the long, straight nose, the handsome planes of his face, and wonder why he seemed so familiar.

"Thank you for your time," he said, finishing up the interview, apparently unaware that I had been more engrossed in staring at him than in answering his question. Or perhaps he was used to it. He was a very handsome man. "I'll give your troupe a call when this article is printed, since I'm sure you would like to read it." He flashed a polite smile that made his face and his eyes light up, and I know I blushed, though the dim lights of the backstage didn't show it, for which I was glad. "Shinohara-san, was it?"

"And you are?" I said, more out of a duty to be polite than anything, though my heart was suddenly beating fast.

"Saionji," he said, bowing again. "Saionji Kyouichi."

It hit me all at once and my mouth dropped open. "No way. _Kyouichi?_"

He recognized me about two seconds after that, and we stood there in the hallway like two idiots, laughing our heads off, till the manager stuck his head out from behind the office door to see what was the matter and told us in an irritated voice to be quiet.

Kyouichi was adamant that he should take me out to dinner or something sometime so we could "catch up," as he called it. I was a little flattered and a little excited, and said yes, and gave him my cell phone number so he could get a hold of me the next time he was free. I watched as he gave me a friendly smile and a wave, and as the door closed behind him, I shook my head and blinked and wondered if it had all been a dream, because this Kyouichi was nothing like the boy Kyouichi I still had filed in my memories somewhere.

We went out for coffee in one of the little cafes lining the streets of Harajuku about two nights after that, and I'm not sure how it happened, but after we had sat there talking for at least four hours, we went home on the train and then he came over and everything was just kind of a blur from there.

Kyouichi was not my first boyfriend, but he was definitely the one that sticks out in my mind as a strong presence, someone who was not just a boyfriend but a friend, someone who I knew I could count on as being there when I needed him. All of the other boyfriends and even most of my friends would spout off things about being "there," because wasn't that what friendship was all about? And then when I actually needed them most, they were not "there."

But Kyouichi was different.

I don't think I have ever felt as alive as when I was with him. I had never been an especially attractive girl, but there were days I would walk into practice and one of my colleagues would waltz over, complimenting me on how pretty I looked that day. If it was a male colleague, it would be usually followed by "and do you want to go out to dinner tonight?" Whereas one of the girls, who knew a little more about my personal life than the men did, would interject, "Baka! She's got a boyfriend!"

My parents liked this latest development. I knew they were already planning the wedding the first time I mentioned Kyouichi's name to them, and I knew that made Kyouichi uncomfortable. He had mentioned to me many times that he was not ready to settle down yet, that the role of Japanese husband did not appeal to him. The role of dutiful Japanese wife had never appealed to me either, but sometimes looking at him, I could see myself playing that role, if it was with him.

Looking back, I realize the reason I felt so comfortable, so free with Kyouichi wasn't just because of the way he treated me, nor was it simply because of the fact that I was so in love with him I would go anywhere and do anything he asked me. I was in love with him, probably to that degree, but there are more things to being in love than lying there at night staring into a pair of pretty violet eyes and feeling his silky green hair wrap around me and feeling wanted. No, one of the main reasons I felt so at home with Kyouichi was because I enjoyed the company of his friends.

Kyouichi didn't have many friends, but those that he did have were crazy, wacky, off-the-wall, and I loved them. About a week after we officially started dating, he had sworn up and down that if I would only go with him and his friends to dinner, I'd find that I fit in completely. I had been wary at first, because none of the other boys I dated had ever wanted me to meet their friends, and when I had, I found that they were all the same ﾁEchain-smoking, crude liars to whom I was just their friend's latest conquest. So I hesitated. He finally had enough one night and told me we were going out to dinner, just him and me. It wasn't until we stepped into the diner that I realized that he had not quite been telling the truth.

I will always remember meeting Tsuchiya Ruka there in that smoky, dimly-lighted cramped eatery with the waiters squeezing between the narrow aisles delivering beer and tempura udon and curry rice and big pans of okonomiyaki fresh from the kitchen, with the raucous drunks trying to sing pop songs in the background and the gossipy women at the next table telling some scandalous tales about their boyfriends. I had been expecting a group of reporters, perhaps a few women, but mostly serious, studious boys a few years out of university, probably there to have a beer and to make small talk with Kyouichi's girlfriend before they could go home.

The first thing I noticed when we entered the diner was a table of about three or four men seated close by the door, talking and laughing over a few beers and a big plate of what looked like eggrolls. When Kyouichi pointed to that table, and one of the men turned around and waved, I had to fight hard not to let my mouth drop open.

There was a long-haired man sitting closest to me who looked up with an easy grin, and Kyouichi said he was a plumber, Mitsuru. The next man over, (Tatsuya, said Kyouichi, in a whisper, stay away from him ﾁEhe's one of those womanizers ﾁEwhich earned a snort from Tatsuya, who said _I heard that!_) was an editor in Kyouichi's department. And then there was the man at the edge of the table, licking his fingers from the last eggroll he had just eaten, looking up at us with cheerful blue eyes that were almost purple in the light, through a mop of shaggy purple hair.

"You must be Shinohara Wakaba," he said, nodding his head in an almost-bow from where he was sitting. "I've heard a lot about you."

"Yuriko," I corrected automatically, feeling my cheeks heat again, doubly glad for the dim lighting this time. I felt Kyouichi's amusement as he pulled out a chair for me and then took a seat, reaching for one of the eggrolls at the same time.

"Ruka is our odd man out," Tatsuya said, grinning. "Ruka likes to travel."

"I like trains," Ruka said in a calm voice, deadpan. "I liked them so much that a few years back I decided that all I wanted to do for the rest of my life was ride them."

"You're aﾁEconductor?" I hazarded, not believing for a moment that this man lounging on the edge of his chair was a JR train conductor.

"Oh hell no," Ruka said, and the plumber smothered a laugh. "I don't think I'd last a day working for the train systemﾁEhey'd kick my ass out the door first chance they got. No, I just ride the trains. I've been all over. It's a fascinating country, Japan, and people have seen too little of it, if you ask me."

"I didn't know you could do that," I said, and Ruka laughed again. "So youﾁEon't live anywhere? You don't have a job? Anything?"

Ruka looked contemplative. "I've got lots of friends. In all kinds of places, low, high, east, west, wherever you'd like to look. As for a jobﾁE work odd jobs. A few months here, a few months there. I'm into construction right now, but I'm quite sure I'll get sick of it in a couple weeks. Maybe I'll go back to Hakodate."

"It's cold up there," Mitsuru protested, and Ruka shrugged.

"It's getting towards winter. I haven't been skiing in a while."

I stared at him, trying to make sense of Ruka's words. No job? No home? He sensed my confusion, because he laughed again and offered me an eggroll. I took it with one clumsy hand. "The train system in this country really is something terrific," he told me, as if confiding some important secret, blue eyes dancing mysteriously. "There isn't anything better than to just be on the train to somewhere, anywhereﾁEven Yokohama, to look outside the window at the blue sky or the cityscapes, and realize that you're traveling across kilometers and kilometers of history. There's history everywhere here, you know. Japan is full of history. You Tokyo-ites seem to forget that sometimes."

"Aw, shut up," Kyouichi said, and the plumber laughed, and I felt my lips turn up into a smile. Ruka turned around, raising his hand for another beer.

"History, huh," I said simply, not daring to speak up and say that I'd never really been out of the Tokyo area. I'd been to Yokohama, of course, and my family had been to Enoshima once for two days during the summer when I was in the fifth grade. My older brother and my father and I had gone to play on the beach, and my mother had wandered the town with my younger brother, who had smiled so widely for weeks after that trip that I would beg my parents for the chance to go to Enoshima again, just so he could smile like that. But money was tight, and we never went.

"You'll forgive Ruka," Tatsuya said. "He's from Osaka. He's got some kind of weird Kansai wanderlust itch that he's been trying to scratch forever and hasn't quite succeeded yet."

"And probably never will," Kyouichi proclaimed. A plate of okonomiyaki appeared in the middle of the table, accompanied by the rapidly retreating form of a waiter's back, and I took a small slice for myself. It smelled heavenly and tasted just as good. "Ruka's one of those people who are like shadows, I thinkﾁEever here for long, never know when he'll be back."

"But I will be back," Ruka proclaimed, placing both hands on the table and sitting up very straight, looking like an impish king on his throne presiding over court. "You know I'll always be back."

I thought about Ruka that night after Kyouichi had dropped me off at home and begged leave, saying that he had an article to finish. I wondered what it would have been like to grow up like that, without restraints, without being tied down to the town you were born in because of something you could not control. I wondered what it would be like to ride the train at night, far from the lights of Tokyo, with the shapes of people asleep in the seats around you and the only light the far-off twinkle of the stars, knowing that Japan was full of history and you were out to discover it.

"We should take a train ride somewhere," I said to Kyouichi some time after that, and he ruffled my hair and grinned.

"We should," he said.

But we never did. He was always busy and I was always busy, and I suppose it was only natural that our relationship never quite worked out like either of us wanted to. I was the one to break it off in the end, to the sorrow of both sets of our parents. But none of them wept any angry tears over it. None of them were like that ﾁEmine had raised me to be independent, to do what needed to be done, and Kyouichi's parents never meddled much in his affairs, for which both of us were grateful.

In the days that followed our breakup, I took to taking long walks around the neighborhood, hands in my pockets, wandering aimlessly, deep in thought. It would be assumed that Kyouichi's friends would be more of a hindrance than a comfort to me at the time, but I took to spending week nights at the bar or at the diner with them, the same diner in which we'd all met. Usually it was just me and Tatsuya, because Mitsuru worked odd hours now, and Ruka wasﾁEomewhere. He was always somewhere not here. It was quieter without Kyouichi and definitely quieter without Ruka, and sometimes I would sit and wonder how Kyouichi's friends had become my friends and had ceased to be his.

But one night about two weeks after Kyouichi and I had stopped seeing each other, I walked into the diner and the familiar head of purple hair was there, turned towards Tatsuya at our usual table, and I stopped in my tracks, startled, before he turned and saw me and his eyes lit up and he gave me a big smile that just made me feel like everything was right again.

"It's not good for you to take walks alone, with the crime rate going up as it is," he said later to me. "I'll go walking with you, how's that?"

We took to taking walks together after work as the sun set and the air grew quiet and still. I told him about my childhood, about my brother, and he grew grave and quiet, nodding thoughtfully to himself. I had only ever told a few people about my family, because of my fear that people would see me as odd because of my brother. But I knew Ruka was not like that.

"Japan is an odd country," he told me. "We pride ourselves on loving beauty, yet we have a specific idea of what beauty is, and if it doesn't meet our standards, we push it away and pretend it doesn't exist. That's a little strange, I think, just like saying you love dogs, but only loving one breed of dog and pretending the others don't exist."

"Sometimes I used to wish I wasn't Japanese," I said in a low voice. He didn't laugh, just nodded.

"I think many people wish that. And probably many people across the ocean wish that they were Japanese. It's not about wanting what you don't have, thoughﾁEt's about looking around you and realizing Japan really is a beautiful country, through the corruption and the insensitivity and the greyness."

He never pushed himself on me, and I don't even think he was ever interested in me. Ruka was not that kind of person. Being interested in a girl would tie him down, and the one thing that made Ruka special was he was from everywhere and nowhere all at once, with no ties, nothing to hold him back. I was never interested in him in that way anyway, and so I respected his code. He'd regale me with tales from around the country, and then we would wax eloquent on the way the birds were nesting in the trees today, or perhaps if there was a sale at the department store downtown, or on how I had bought too many potatoes and I would never be able to eat them all before they went bad. He'd offered to take half the potatoes.

"Yuriko," he'd said one day, "Life is like a lightning storm sometimes. You stand in the rain and wonder what exactly you've gained by getting yourself all wet, and then the sky lights up like lightning and everything is so crystal clear."

"But the lightning doesn't last long enough," I said. "And besides, I hate thunderstorms."

Ruka snapped his fingers. "Exactly," he said. "That's why."

It wasn't till I was home that night, lying in bed, that I figured out what he had been trying to say. The next day, after work, I went to Kyouichi's apartment and knocked on the door, and as he stood there, blinking at me, I brushed past the awkward silence of not having spoken to him in a month, and told him to get dressed and look presentable, that we were going out to dinner.

"Thank you," I said to Ruka later that night as Kyouichi argued with Tatsuya about stock prices.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he said, and I laughed.

He was gone the next day, on the train on the way to Aomori up north, Tatsuya said, though he didn't sound too sure. "I think he got a call from a friend or somethingﾁEho knows with him, though. I don't think the man's got a family or anyone he's really close to, to be moving around like that."

I asked Kyouichi about it the next night, after he and I had a casual dinner and were taking a walk around the park to aid our digestion, as Ruka would put it. It seemed right that he and I would be here together, not dating, just friends, because for some reason even though we might marry other people and move on with our lives, there was something that could not just be brushed aside.

"Ruka has always been like that," he said, "since I've known him. I can't even remember when or where I met him, just that he's been a dependable part of my life for many years now, and I can't imagine him being anything else. I think he has a big heart for people, and maybe that doesn't involve the meaning of relationships as most of us see relationshipsﾁEut you can always count on Ruka."

"I'm glad of that, at least," I said. "I'm glad I can count on all of you." And Kyouichi had looked at me and given me a small grin.

I have not seen Ruka for about four months now. He sent all of us a postcard from Okinawa, but that's the last I have heard of him since then. I don't believe that's the last we will ever hear from him, but it is a mystery as to when we will see him again. Perhaps I'll walk into our usual diner tomorrow night and I'll see him leaning against the wall, purple hair maybe a little bit longer, a little bit shaggier, but his cheerful smile as bright as always.

Kyouichi and I will remain friends, I think, and that's as much as I really want. The two of us are too different, too independent, and I feel a small understanding to what Ruka feels, not wanting to be tied down to anything. Kyouichi is moving on with his life already ﾁEhe quit his reporter job at the newspaper and got a job as a freelance editorial writer, and is very happy. I am thinking of leaving this town and maybe moving elsewhere, maybe Osaka. My parents have said they will support me in whatever I do, which is a good thing because I don't think I would have the courage to do something like that otherwise. I know Kyouichi doesn't want me to go, and Tatsuya, who I think has a small crush on me, doesn't want me to go either.

I'll see, I think. Maybe Ruka will come back before I make up my mind and I can ask him about Osaka, if the skies are as blue there as they are in Tokyo and if the little birds make their nests in the trees there too the same as they do here. Most likely he'll give me a smile and a wave and tell me to go see for myself.

But who knows? Japan is full of history, a beautiful country in which the stars shine bright at night over the tracks of the railways, and there is so much to explore that I don't think I could do it if I had a thousand lifetimes.

**31 January 04**


End file.
